Exquisitely written, this book introduces the reader to the complexities of Iranian society. It is without limits for not only does it explain the political thinking behind the decision making in Iran, but it helps understand the cultural aspects of Iranian society. For someone who was born there and lived a great deal of her life in that country, I found myself eagerly turning the pages of this book and learning a great deal as I went along.

Something that is certainly hard to find today is an attempt to be objective in explaining a culture, or at least facets of a culture and why those facets are in the condition that they are. Of course, it is impossible to be completely objective, a writer has to be human, after all, though it is sad that even a genuine attempt to leave preconceptions and biases behind cannot be easily procured. Majd, recognizing all of this, presents his personal opinions about the issues that are to follow in the book up front, in the introduction, and then makes a hearty, and substantially successful attempt to leave those opinions behind.

Guiding Westerners through the equivalent of Mars, taking them through the strangest and most familiar places in Iran and aspects of Iranian culture, Majd leads the way for further exploration. Not to say that he doesn't adequately inform, which he more than does, but the insight that he provides ultimately raises interest in learning about Iranian culture. He elucidates a large portion of Iranian life, and why it is the way it is in a fascinating and approachable style.

Hooman Majd has done a fantastic job of describing Iranian cultural nuances to non Iranians.

I am an Iranian myself and I've never seen anyone describing the subtleties of my culture with this level of eloquence and clarity. Ta'arouf is very complex to explain and in my opinion Hooman has nailed it brilliantly. Hooman khodaast! (Hooman is god!) ... here you go, a Persian gholov (hyperbole) for you Amazon readers ;-)

Not to Mr Majd, time to write about America and American culture for Iranian people. Let's keep the dialogue going; let's disappoint the warmongers on both sides.

It is very difficult for westerners to understand Iran, but also very important to do so. I am recommending this book to my students, as it is an easy read (they all carry heavy workloads with their classes) and, since the author is a western brought-up Iranian, its stories (it is told mainly in anecdote) are explained well for western understanding but with credibility. I enjoyed this book and also came away with a better understanding of Iran.

I discovered something very interesting from this book: by the standards of the neighborhood, Iran is a fairly democratic state. The president is elected by popular vote and may not serve more than two consecutive terms. The legislature is elected. In both cases, reformers sometimes win the elections and take office.

Of course, the guy that really controls the country is the "Supreme Leader," but he is also elected, albeit not directly, and may be impeached! These tasks are performed by a special body elected by the people, a little like a permanent Electoral College, the body that actually elects US presidents.

The Supreme Leader can overrule any action by the President and Legislature and can disqualify anyone for running for office. Thus, the Supreme Leader really controls the country. However, by tradition, the Supreme Leader does not usually interfere with day-to-day governance, but rather weighs in fairly rarely.

By contrast, most other governments in the region are simply dictatorships, including close US ally Saudi Arabia. Exceptions are Iraq and (sometimes) Pakistan, both of which are a bit more democratic that Iran.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and was really taken with the humorous aspects of it. All the propaganda we get in the US about Iran is that it's filled with murderous ayatollahs and their underlings, when in fact it's full of ordinary people who are trying to live their lives (well, there are some murderous types there, too). I really appreciated the author's efforts to get the reader to understand the underlying religious and secular strains in modern Iran and how they affect everyone in the country. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand Iran today. It could help prevent another disasterous war in the region.

What a very nice surprise it was to see that much of the book is about the centuries-old interpersonal nuances that dominate social interactions. It reminded me of how in the 1970's everyone was trying to "learn" how to do business with the Japanese by learning their cultural ways. My only concern is that the Persian way of doing things, saying things, not saying things, etc. is going to make foreign policy even more complicated. But for those trying to understand the Middle East, this book is essential reading for its unique insight into the Persian mind.

In the preface, writer Hooman Majd is described in oxymoron as the only person in the life of this particular friend as 100 percent American and 100 percent Iranian. In quoting a Sufi poet Sanai, Majd notes: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,/there is a field. I'll meet you there." This is precisely what he does. This is not a book that attempts to justify the atrocities of any government, but is rather an examination of a country, its views, and how it got there. Though ideologically the Islamic Republic is to have done away with class-- just as Democracy is to have ideally done away with the constrains of the same-- Hooman Majd explores the complex psyche of modern Iran, at once Muslim, Shiite and Persian, all of which Majd defines with great detail, historic significance, personal reference, wit and depth in understanding. While taking us through South Tehran, once the city's roughest neighborhood known as "Texas," onto the government's utilitarian style compound in downtown Tehran, to the privileged homes of former royalists, ambassadors, and artists in North Tehran, to Qom, the desert town and home of Ayatollahs and Shia learning. In introducing us to the complicated personalities in these homes and offices, showing us how and why they got to their particular points of political views and lifestyles, we get an empathetic analysis-- and I stress empathetic as opposed to sympathetic-- in what it means to be Iranian today, and in this climate of what appears to be world tumult, crisis, and confusion. There is a calm centeredness to THE AYATOLLAH BEGS TO DIFFER, which is the manner in which I like to receive information on any highly controversial, timely and topical subject, as opposed to the kind of shrill analyses we find in abundance. I highly recommend Hooman Majd's book for readers who prefer their political and cultural literature written with a masterful sense of balance and wisdom, rather than justification, finger-pointing, and reactionary doctrine.

Not a book for the cherishers of preconceived notions, or the gaggle of aggrieved partisans who live in nostalgic reveries of the despicable Shah, Majd knows what's happening, makes his biases clear -- he is both a capital D American Democrat and an Iranian supporter of the reformist Khatami -- and happens to be a damn fine reporter. He gives the reader a tangible sense of why Iran is as it is, why the Iranians prefer to work with their imperfect Islamic Republic than seek a revolution to replace it, and how the nation's history, religion, food, poetry, and taxi drivers helped it become what it is. It's concrete and mystical, funny and beautiful, and constantly surprising -- I mean both this fantastically readable book and the country it describes.
Oh yes, and it will also tell you exactly what's really going on with that crazy president of theirs and the nuclear enrichment business.

I liked the preface of the book. It was witty; it was stylish; it was diverse; it was even concise and altogether interesting. But the following chapters did not shed any light on the complex and paradoxical nation as promised in the book's blurb. The book indeed adds a little to the existing confusion by its distanced, raw and abstract view of a country which is as alien to the writer as to Martians.
Refreshing and promising as it appears in the first chapter, the book plunges into the same old format so many other books written since the dawn of the Islamic Republic, all hinging on a reductionism common to the American mindset. Majd tries to solve the complexity of the Iranian society and its politics by reducing everything to an alleged central doctrine of Shiism called haqq ("rights").
He argues that Iran is a "Muslim country, a Shia country and significantly a Persian country." As Shiites, Iranians are marked with an inferiority complex, and are devoted to protect their haqq. Imam Hussein, Prophet Mohammad's grandson, who was killed by his rival to the caliphate, has become the embodiment of haqq for Iranians; and his death is still mourned by Shiites.
To support his arguments, he takes us through a labyrinth of the colloquial Iranian expressions such as "haqqam khordeh shodeh" (meaning `my rights have been violated') and also khak bar sar kardan, (meaning heaping dust upon the head) as examples of vernacular expressions people use to convey their frustration in life and to the Iranian use of enclosed gardens for our backyards, to the changing of names, etc. etc., all equally devoid of any substantial merit. Some of the examples are not so unique to Muslims or Iranians, and others not so accurate.
Though I can appreciate the free style of his writing, I feel strongly that we writers have a responsibility to stick to the truth and defend the right as opposed to the convenient. While I acknowledge that there is no universal law to govern our theories or hypotheses about a nation, we must stick to the facts to deduce historical patters. We ought to leave this to the historians and scholar who know more than just a few pages of Iran's grand history. Majd's book not only overlooks this, but his book seems like a mass grave for every truth which was murdered twice painfully--once by the Islamic Republic and another by Majd, who appears on the our political scene among a new wave of Western-educated Iranians who seems to be born again Shii-Iranian, becoming apologists for the regime.
The book does not even touch the abuses of human rights in the Islamic Republic; the increasing enforcement of sharia law, designed for the eight century of Arabia; or the lawlessness in a country of seventy millions; or the hypocrisy of the religious elites. He dismisses them as "failures" and avoids discussing them. However he spends page after page explaining the virtues of the double life people have to live in terms of "Iranian's deep need for privacy" which is well-respected by the Islamic Republic and ignored by late Shah!
The Iranians' humanity is also missing. Majd's view of Iran is devoid of any humanity, tenderness and spontaneity. If readers expect to see the kindness, love and compassion, generosity, and gentleness once associated with our homeland, they would be sorely disappointed. Hooman's Iran is populated by bunch of Islamic robots who respond to life exactly as the ayatollahs expect them to.
The author, himself detached from everyone and everything around, looks through his camera and picks up what cameras are equipped to pick up. Among the dozens of books written on Iran, this one is unique in how its author perceives himself as a breed apart and how unimpressed he is about the life around him. Yet I do not blame him in the least. That could have been partly the result of his cinematography training, which makes one see what the camera sees as well as being 100% Iranian and 100% American, meaning probably neither one.
The author's capacity to make every wrong right, to justify every injustice by finding grounds for it in Iranian culture, and to explain every mess by means of some ulterior motives is awesome. The author seems to have written this book not so much as he claims on the book's cover to examine the country's paradoxical nature (and which nation is empty of paradoxes?), but to show his ability to twist all these complexities and make them appear right.
And yes, he does it successfully, he twists, he turns, he wheels and he deals. Our dear magician plunges his hands into his magic hat and pulls out an olive wreath and places it on the Islamic Republic's head. He wipes away all the shame from the face of the Islamic Republic, thought he can not take away the shadow of sorrow, indignity and humiliation from the face of people. To lift the pain from he heart and mind of those who day by day have to look into their misery, magic is not enough, one needs to perform miracle. With all his ability, Majd is comes up short here!

Iranian regime is a criminal entity and this book can not change their criminal image. This terrible book is yet another attempt by the Iranian regime to paint a rosie and calm picture of Iran. The book tries to sell the idea that despite theocratic rule, there's an open society where dissenters are tolerated and all is well with the Islamic Republic. Well, as someone who lived most of my life in Iran (until a few yrs ago) I really beg to differ. This book offers nothing new. It's really disappointing to see that goons like Hooman Majd, the author, has sold his soul to the brutal regime of Iran to make the very regime that kills authors and dissidents look good. Big disappointment. Zero star! Apologists & eslah talaban like the author of this book should be ashamed of their work. Shameful....